


Yeah. It Really Is.

by MermaidMayonnaise



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: C'mon guys validate me I didn't sleep on a school night for this, It's funny because I compulsively make bad jokes, M/M, Self-referential to the point of incomprehensibility, They go outside and look at the stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 10:59:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16240250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/MermaidMayonnaise
Summary: “Sometimes,” Jeremy said, “I like to go outside late at night and just stand there. I don’t have any reason to be out there, no goals, and I’m not thinking of anything. I just am.”“That sounds peaceful,” Michael said to him softly.“Yeah.” Jeremy looked thoughtful. “It is.”-----------------------------------------------------------The boyfs go outside in the middle of the night during a power outage to look at the stars. Short and sweet ficlet for Fictober.





	Yeah. It Really Is.

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to the people who told me they would be happy if I posted something. (Also another shoutout to the person who hit me irl and told me that it's about fucking time. I love you too.)  
> This isn't an update to my usual story, but that's coming soon. This ficlet might actually be a chapter in the actual story. Oops.

When the power went out in the suburbs of New Jersey, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Which led to Michael and Jeremy standing in Jeremy’s kitchen at 2 AM, having been forcefully kicked out of their video game marathon.

They were both in their pajamas, shivering slightly. The house’s heating system had been downed along with everything else. Mr. Heere was sleeping, as always on the couch in front of the lifeless television.  Boredom threatened to settle in. Jeremy and Michael liked each other, but their introverted natures did not appreciate being torn from their respective screens in the middle of the night. Their people filters were on, and their interaction capacity was filled to the max. Their phones were both dead, and there was no electricity to charge them.

This was, obviously, a conflict example of man vs. nature.

“Sometimes,” Jeremy said, his voice echoing off the granite cabinets and oak cabinets of the kitchen, “I like to go outside late at night and just stand there. I don’t have any reason to be out there, no goals, and I’m not thinking of anything. I just am.”

“That sounds peaceful,” Michael said to him softly.

“Yeah.” Jeremy looked thoughtful. “It is.”

There was a moment of silence. But it wasn’t tense, rather, it was reflective, the cool stillness of an isolated pond.

Then Jeremy threw a stone in the metaphorical pond, splashes and ripples appearing as they made their way to the shore. “Do you want to go outside with me?”

Michael startled. “What?”

“Do you- do you want to go outside with me? Like, r-right now?”

As much as Michael wished that Jeremy asked him that exact sentence without the word ‘side’ in it, he understood the implications. This was a part that Jeremy, reclusive, extremely private Jeremy, had kept away to himself for who knows how many years. Sharing it with Michael must have been another huge step in trust for him. As they say, one small step for man…

“Sure,” Michael answered him with a shy smile, blushing in the intimacy of the moment. “I heard Orion’s pretty to look at this time of year.”

“Ha.” Jeremy couldn’t resist poking fun at him. “Gay.”

“You know it,” Michael said as Jeremy took his hand and gingerly led him outside.

They cupped their steaming mugs carefully as they started their journey to Jeremy’s backyard. As an afterthought, they both grabbed the fluffy blankets strewn on the coach, the tasseled ends dragging behind them on the polished floor, then the cool grass. Jeremy led the way, having let go of Michael’s hand to carry all of their miscellaneous (see, video games did improve vocabulary) items. Michael missed its warmth. Somehow, the heat from the hot chocolate wasn’t the same; the body heat was somehow… less sharp.

The unmown grass whispered quietly against their bare ankles as the boys slipped quietly through the yard, silent mirages concealed on a windy plain. The sky was fully dark, but the black wasn’t all onyx; it was stained with a slight tinge of blue. No other sound could be heard except the wind and their rustling footsteps, occasionally crunching on dead leaves that Jeremy had missed when raking that fall.

No street lamps to illuminate the silent suburban streets left the suburbs of New Jersey shadowed in various shades of gray. A waning gibbous moon cast its reflective light upon the trees, stretching and distorting their shadows.

Jeremy led Michael to a small grove of trees near the back, and they simultaneously recalled autumn afternoons of running with the sun on their faces and backs and yelling happily and the sweet yet tangy taste of the tree’s apples of their tongues. Those were happier, simpler times. Sometimes Michael wished that he could go back to his childhood. Everything was so much less complicated then, in the comfort of autumn.

But fall was gone now, swept away with the vestiges of swimming pools and Halloween decorations- hell, even those overpriced Pumpkin Spice Lattes.

They eventually reached the biggest tree of all, a sturdy beech whose four branches curved dramatically to the sides in the cardinal directions. Mr. Heere always joked that the tree was so much like a compass that it would help Jeremy find the way home if he ever got lost.

Privately, Michael thought that maybe the tree resembled a mother figure for Jeremy. Having read _My Antonia_ , where the trees were metaphors for people standing against the wild red grass of the plains, he was inclined to think that trees in the physical world stood for something too. The metaphor of Mother Nature worked, in this case, additionally regarding the fact that Jeremy had basically grown up climbing this tree.

Jeremy’s love for the tree bordered on obsession, and Michael would have intervened except that the most harm it seemed to be doing to Jeremy was that he spent long periods of time climbing and sitting by himself in the nook that he had constructed for himself.

He was talented at constructing things, Jeremy was. He even took art classes in school, although that was a little known fact that he concealed from everyone except Michael. Even though it was fairly obvious where he came from when he rushed late into English class, unwashed clay under his ragged nails. Maybe he liked to create things because he was was bored. Possibly he needed to fill the void left by his mother. Or maybe he simply enjoyed doing art and was gifted with being good at it.

Michael didn’t know and didn’t want to think about it anymore, but that didn’t change the fact that Jeremy had constructed a sort of spiderweb, up there in the branches.

One of the branches, the West Branch that faced the setting sun, was thicker and studier than the others, and had smaller branches extending from it. Jeremy had somehow constructed a sort of net, weaving and knotting the rope in between the branches. Anyone could sit up there, if they possessed the skill necessary to even climb up. Michael was one of those people, guided by a younger Jeremy who was confident in his abilities back then.

That tree had many metaphysical memories attached to it, but what was special, really special, was that it had a treehouse resting in its topmost branches. A treehouse was a relative term in this case, because that it was only a board with slats of polished wood nailed on it to provide stability and support. At this point, it may have been the only thing holding the tree together. The branches had leaned even more treacherously outward over the years, and it creaked ominously if one of them put their weight on it. Michael always joked that Jeremy would meet his death climbing the tree. Jeremy had laughed, looked at the tree fondly, and said, “Nah. She wouldn't do that,” a hand fondly patting the North Branch.

The tree house was perfect. Presently, Jeremy paused below it, pausing to hand the mugs to Michael and tossing the blankets onto the ground. His long, lanky frame carried him easily up the tree, and seconds later he reappeared high above, his brown curls falling on his forehead, which for once wasn’t sweaty for the activity. Maybe he was born to be up there, climbing higher and higher among the leaves and branches. He was like that weird dude Evan from his school, who also had a weird obsession with trees. Michael didn’t judge people for their kinks.

A rope ladder was lowered down, slowly as to not accidentally concuss Michael. The ladder, too, was old; Jeremy had made it himself, tying wooden bars taken from his old swing set monkey bars horizontally to two long coils of rope. The “rungs” of the ladder were slightly uneven, past-Jeremy not yet proficient in his knot-tying skills and present-Jeremy too lazy to attempt the arduous and time-consuming work of unraveling the knots and redoing the ladder.

Michael threw the blankets up, Jeremy catching them with surprising reflexes, and Michael climbed up the ladder slowly as he carried one mug in one hand. He reached his arm as high as he could so Jeremy could take it from his hands, and went down the ladder to repeat the process again with the other ceramic vessel. (Jeremy had crafted these too in some art class. Michael hoped they weren’t leaky.)

He used to have a fear of heights. A lifelong friendship with Jeremy had obliterated that fear. He couldn’t even count the times that Jeremy had shown up at his door, dragging him to see (read: climb) another cool tree he had found in the park near his house.

One hand over the other. Bend the knee, raise the foot, place it on the rung, repeat. Easy does it- think of something else, something like how the air was cold and crisp and had a certain, distinct smell to it, not unpleasant- and Michael had scaled the lopsided ladder with only minor discomfort.

Jeremy greeted him at the top with his mug and a reassuring smile. His freckles stood out against his face, a pale oval in the uncertain light. He had made a nest out of the blankets they had brought up, padding it with the canvas pillows that perpetually remained up there among the squirrels.

They started to settle in with practiced ease: Michael on the left, Jeremy on the right. Though they had never done this up in the treehouse before, hundreds of video game sessions had to leave an impact, especially with the two of them being the creatures of habit that they were. Michael was a lefty and Jer a righty, so it worked out well for both of them. If they balanced themselves in the middle, the creaking of the platform stopped. Michael tried to not think about the lack of railings and how if one of them rolled to the side they would fall two stories and splatter on the ground.

But Jeremy was here. Jeremy wouldn’t let him fall, and Michael would do the same for him.

They settled into the pile of blankets, instinctively huddling together to preserve warmth, like penguins. Fine, they were definitely cuddling. But no homo.

“Look,” Jeremy spoke softly once they were settled in, as if to not disturb the stillness of the night around them. “Look at the stars.”

The bare, widely placed branches of the ancient tree provided them with a clear, uninterrupted view of the night sky. The night wind whistled quietly past them, lightly stinging Michael’s eyes and cheeks. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust before he could see anything, both because of the light pollutions and him squinting against the wind.

Michael caught his breath. “Wow.”

“Yeah...”

The sky opened up above them, an endless expanse of that not-quite-black. Stars glittered above them, pointed pinpricks that shone with their own special light. That light had probably traveled hundreds of light years, only to strike Michael’s eye. He felt special, he felt chosen that the stars had decided to gift their light that had traveled so far onto the two of them.

This was it. This was the epitome of nature and beauty. Michael was awestruck. Michael--

“Look, I think I see a star that's part of the big dipper.” Michael pointed to a bright light in the sky.

“That's a plane.”

“Fuck you,” Michael shot back, “you know I'm no good at math!”

Jeremy crinkled his nose at him. “Math?”

Michael, who knew when he was beaten, turned away. He couldn’t help but marvel again at just how quiet it was. The power outage really had shut everything down. There was no humming of the generators, and it was too late at night for kids to be yelling in the street.

It was just them.

The sky suddenly felt like it was pressing down on him, squeezing all the breath from his lungs. They were so alone, them and the rest of planet Earth. Their civilization was too idiotic for aliens to contact them. It was just them, just Earth (just Monika!), a chunk of dirt hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour.

It was them... And the sky... And the moon... And all of nature… And all of…

Maybe... they weren’t so alone as he first thought. His breathing slowed down, his unknowingly tense muscles relaxing back into the blankets.

“I know,” said Jeremy, who was always creepily good at reading his mind. “It’s a lot at first. I thought so, too, when I first came up here.”

“How do you get through it? That… that feeling of insignificance?”

“I try not to think, but I think at the same time.”

“Double thinking? You mean like in _1984_?”

He laughed. “Yeah, except without the torture and the mind control.”

“Dork.” Michael sipped from his mug.

Jeremy did the same, tilting his head back so the pale line of his neck was exposed. But, like, not in a weird way. “Back at you.”

It started to snow, white flakes drifting down softly from the night sky. It was the best kind of snow, the kind where the snowflakes were fat and sticky and stayed on the ground so you could roll and build huge snowmen with them.

White settled onto the both of them, dusting the treehouse and the soft blankets and Jeremy’s cardigan, slung over his pajamas. The wind had picked up a little, but the tree’s branches shielded them from the majority of it. It wasn’t even that cold, huddled there in the sky with his best friend.

“You have a flake right… here,” his best friend said, as he extended his hand and booped Michael’s nose.

“Hey!” Michael protested, giggling. But he didn’t move away. Their shared body heat was nice, and the blankets were finally starting to heat up.

“I lied,” Jeremy whispered mischievously, “it was whipped cream,” and wiped his finger on the blanket.

“Well, that was a waste of whipped cream,” he protested, swatting Jeremy’s shoulder lightly. “Also, you only told me now?”

“Don’t worry, you can have mine,” Jeremy told him, withholding the _Because it was cute_ that threatened to make it past his lips. “I don’t like whipped cream much anyway.”

As Michael went to take the mug, he realized that it was empty. “You bitch.”

Jeremy leaned back, snorting. “You fell for it hook, line, and sinker.”

Deigning not to respond, another silence fell upon them. This silence was like the soundlessness of the night, peaceful and reflective. It was suitable for their 2AM excursion, with the dark and the wind and the snow that continued to drift down, slowly erasing the world in white. A new beginning. A new start. But Michael had never felt more at home, cuddled here with here under the bright, twinkling stars.

“Thanks for sharing this with me. This is nice,” Michael confessed, putting his arm around Jeremy.

Jeremy smiled softly, resting his head on Michael’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said. “It really is.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yep. That's my contribution to Fictober. Thanks for reading!  
> ((I'm not saying that I'm ecstatic waking up to an inbox full of comments,, but I'm also not saying that I don't.))  
> My tumblr is mermaidmayonnaise and I love to chat with Strangers from the Internet who Share My Interests.
> 
> Comments make my day, and kudos make the world go round.


End file.
